making the world a better place, one carb at a time.

Sugar, sugar

When I started school back in August, I admittedly didn’t give much thought to the non-baking/cooking portions of our curriculum; they existed as a sort of abstract, far-off thing that I wouldn’t have to worry about until later. Truthfully, they intimidated me so much that I didn’t want to even acknowledge that I would have to do them, because if I acknowledged it, I’d worry about it, and if I spent time and energy worrying about it, that was less time and energy I could spend doing more immediate, important things.

A couple of weeks ago, however, I realized that I’d gotten to a point of such exhaustion that I simply don’t have time to stress about anything anymore; so when I realized our advanced sugar unit was coming up, rather than worry and bite my nails trying to plan out some elaborate showpiece, I kind of just went, “cool, I’ve always wanted to learn how to blow sugar.”

That kind of attitude actually took off a lot of pressure and allowed me to enjoy learning more, even when my partner and I (read: I) accidentally spilled vinegar on our freshly-poured isomalt, rendering it useless, even when we messed up our butterscotch candies, even when our blue and yellow sugars mixed into this gorgeous shade of emerald.

My class spent most of our three-week unit curiously asking each other what we were planning on doing for our showpiece; even though we were relatively confident about most of the various sugar techniques we’d learned, none of us was remotely confident about putting them together into one cohesive project. Eventually, we all got it together, and I have to say, we all put out some pretty great work!